Well, There's Defi, and there are NFTs. But is this all? We're in 2021 with powerful tech and finance leapfrogging with Blockchain/Distributed Ledger Technology. Cryptoverse has redeemed itself as it's not merely a speculative asset or drug/dirty money but something of actual value and utility. This post sheds some light on an unpopular area of utilization of crypto, Trade Finance. Prevailing Problems with Trade Finance are 60%
of SME trade finance requests are denied and 1.5 trillion USD is the resulting global trade finance gap. The core reason behind these problems is Trust. “An importer and exporter, if they don’t know each other, they start from an element of mistrust. The importer doesn’t want to pay unless he sees the merchandise and the exporter doesn’t want to ship unless he sees the money. So one of the two parties has to take a risk." - Roberto Mancone
SMEs don't have the liquidity to produce/send goods upfront. Banks don't trust the SMEs that they'll be able to pay back, the buyer doesn't trust the vendor with the goods hence cannot pay upfront. Blockchain-based projects appropriate the Assets Tokenization(NFTs), Decentralized Exchanges, Trustless Liquidity, and Debt MarketPlaces(based on smart contracts) to bridge the gap in trade finance.
There are some projects already out there that have solved these problems and are gaining institutional attention. Centrifuge TinLake and Persistence(Comdex app) are two such brilliant projects. The former is focused on the west while the latter is focused more on Asia. Persistence is based on a tendermint based chain(cosmos) and Tinlake is substrate-based. You can understand the importance of these by this post.
I strongly believe in the coming future we'll be seeing more attention from retail and enterprise investors. Comdex application is already live with real enterprises trading commodities, with already $50M+ in trading volumes. Development and more advancement in this segment are unavoidable. Open to discussions and criticism